Wednesday, January 28, 2009

"Microsoft has made some stumbles in the mobile world, but a strategy shift made more than a year ago will soon pay dividends, the company's top Windows Mobile executive said in an interview with CNET News. Andy Lees, the executive brought over from the server unit a year ago, said that Microsoft's efforts to make sure that its mobile software could run on a wide range of phones resulted in an operating system that failed to take advantage of advances in hardware. "We aimed to go for a lower common denominator," Lees said. Microsoft was also limited by the origins of Windows Mobile, which was developed to power handheld computers that neither connected to a network nor handled voice. "We started out when we were in PDAs (personal digital assistants) and then a phone got strapped to the back of the PDA," Lees said. The company also failed to recognize that phones--even those that were used for business--were still as much personal as they were professional."

The first four paragraphs of the CNET/ZDNet article accurately highlight some of Windows Mobile's flaws, and why the once-venerable smartphone operating system, at times, appears feeble next to relative newcomers, iPhone OS, Android, and webOS. But it's not all doom and gloom for Microsoft. According to Andy Lees, we'll see some breakthroughs over the next 18 months, with the first set expected as soon as mid-February as Microsoft takes the stage at MWC. Lees hinted at an increased reliance on the cloud, the need to improve the core of Windows Mobile in order to keep up with the competition, and a closer relationship with OEMs (which we can only hope translates to more frequent and more consistent updates for all consumers).